I had totally forgotten about the homemade intranasal vaccine plot line (tl;dr itās easy to do but nobody has yet publicly revealed serology results after doing it)
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it's not biologically *insane* and the guys behind it are legit biologists (george church in particular is brilliant) but none of them have any experience making vaccines
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they started doing this in the summer and my assumption is that if they had been able to get good antibody titres someone would have said something by now
not like george church can't get his hands on an antibody assay
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I do not know enough about what your immune system does when it finds random peptides in your nose!
(Or indeed much at all about how we ~usually end up selectively seek-and-destroy-ing *pathogens* and not random dirt)
But this sure looks like it would get peptide in your nose!
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And the normal process can fail, of course: foods (allergies), onesself (autoimmune diseases)...
but like, if you sprayed a new food in your nose that wouldn't make you allergic to it.
I really don't understand!
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the George Church ones Iād heard of seemed pretty legit to me tbh, but Iām also the sort of person who last summer was like āif we donāt hang a vaccine approved by EOY, Iām switching to making genetically modified tomato vaccines in my backyard and nobody can stop meā
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as for this writeupās vaccine, it hadnāt occurred to me that you could just *buy* the peptides straight... and then take them intranasally. all my immune models do say āyeah this should be fine,ā so Iāll be interested to see how the commercial test results work out!
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No - antibodies to small peptides work for denaturing conditions (imagine stretching out a proteins amino acids into a linear sequence) like a western blot. They definitely wouldn't work for generating conformational antibodies. Could plausibly provide some T-cell immunity.
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